Introduction: Crisis and Action II

in the early months of 2025, as our editorial collective took the helm of JAF: A Global Quarterly, our discipline was awakening to the hard realities brought about by newly elected political leadership in the United States that was predictably but rapidly becoming hostile to universities, to cultural institutions, to our disciplines, and to the communities many of us are part of and work within. These challenges remain, as of this writing, vast and intersecting, and their impact expands far beyond the political boundaries of the United States. In the spring of 2025, we issued a call for Perspectives essays that spoke to the theme of “Crisis and Action,” and in the Winter 2026 issue (vol. 139, no. 551), JAF published the first of a two-part series of essays that speak to both the state of the field and the state of the world.We continue that conversation in this issue, with essays focusing on specific components of the current and ongoing crises. These essays cut across issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, health care and government-endorsed misinformation, organizing and activism, and the crisis in Gaza. Taken as a whole, the 12 essays published in these themed Perspectives forums have laid a foundation for continued engagement with the work that we continue to do and the futures that we continue to imagine; they have articulated why our discipline continues to matter in the face of atrocities, and they have, seemingly against all odds, argued for the value to be found in daring to hope and dreaming to build anew.